He declared the site “a spectacle of utter devastation,” with yawning pits and dismantled brick walls where the sand was mixed with mummy wrappings and bones. Saqqara didn’t attract much archaeological attention until the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette, who became the first director of Egypt’s Antiquities Service, visited in 1850. Looters carted off not only mummified people but also mummified animals-hawks, ibises, baboons. Sources: Smithsonian Channel, At Land Productions, Lion TVĪpart from its eroding pyramids, Saqqara was known, by contrast, for its subterranean caverns, which locals raided for mummies to use as fertilizer and tourists ransacked for souvenirs. When Jean-François Champollion deciphered hieroglyphs, in the 1820s, the history of one of humanity’s great civilizations could finally be read, and European scholars and enthusiasts flocked to see not only the pyramids at Giza but also the colossal Ramses II statues carved into the cliffs at Abu Simbel and the royal tombs in Luxor’s Valley of the Kings. But Egyptology, the formal study of ancient Egyptian civilization, didn’t begin in earnest until Napoleon Bonaparte invaded at the turn of the 19th century and French scholars collected detailed records of ancient sites and scoured the country for antiquities. Travelers visiting Egypt have long marveled at the vestiges of the pharaohs’ lost world-the great pyramids, ancient temples and mysterious writings carved into stone. Yet it nurtured ideas so powerful they still shape our lives today. It was a hive of ritual and magic that arguably couldn’t seem more distant from our modern world. The site is full of contradictions, entwining past and future, spirituality and economics. ![]() They say it opens a window into a period late in ancient Egyptian history when Saqqara was at the center of a national revival in pharaonic culture and attracted visitors from across the known world. The scale of discoveries-captured in the Smithsonian Channel documentary series “Tomb Hunters,” an advance copy of which was made available to me-has excited archaeologists. noblewoman to a bronze figure of the god Nefertem inlaid with precious gems. The trove includes many individual works of art, from the gilded portrait mask of a sixth- or seventh-century B.C. The excavators overseen by Youssef uncovered hundreds of coffins, mummies and grave goods, including carved statues and mummified cats, packed into several shafts, all untouched since antiquity. This eerie chamber is one of several “megatombs,” as the archaeologists describe them, discovered last year at Saqqara, the sprawling necropolis that once served the nearby Egyptian capital of Memphis. ![]() The floor itself was covered in rags and bones. Gilded coffins were packed into niches around the walls. Beautifully painted, human-shaped boxes were stacked roughly on top of heavy limestone sarcophagi. Instead, the archaeologists were astonished to discover dozens of expensive coffins jammed together, piled to the ceiling as if in a warehouse. Yet this was no luxurious family tomb, as might have been expected. Inside, Youssef and his colleagues found signs that the people buried here had wealth and privilege: gilded masks, a finely carved falcon and a painted scarab beetle rolling the sun across the sky. It was Youssef’s first glimpse of a large chamber that was guarded by a heap of figurines, carved wooden chests and piles of blackened linen. ![]() At the bottom, he shined his flashlight through a gap in the limestone wall and was greeted by a god’s gleaming eyes: a small, painted statue of the composite funerary deity Ptah-Sokar-Osiris, with a golden face and plumed crown. One scorching day last fall, Mohammad Youssef, an archaeologist, clung to a rope inside a shaft that had been closed for more than 2,000 years. The excavation site is not far from Djoser’s Step Pyramid, which was thought to convey divine energy. This article is a selection from the July/August issue of Smithsonian magazine Buy Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12
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